Motion Light Lab

Melissa Malzkuhn is the founder and creative director of Motion Light Lab. The lab creates award-winning bilingual storybook apps to support the literacy development of deaf children.Third generation Deaf, Malzkuhn has been involved in community organizing, in particular deaf youth leadership and Deaf representation in media. Motion Light Lab offers training on storybook development, and works on creating sign-fluent animation characters that supports access for young Deaf readers. Melissa is co-founder and one of the producers behind The ASL App, an app that teaches conversational ASL, and had over two million downloads. Melissa started a campaign to raise awareness of sign language access through her Hu: To Sign is Human screenprinting art. Melissa Malzkuhn is an Obama Fellow, inaugural class 2018-2020.  She resides in Washington DC with her family. 

95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, who do not know sign language. A majority of them acquire language at a late age, which we know now means language deprivation. Late language acquisition has a lifelong impact on their cognitive development, and academia, and especially literacy skills. 

Our storybook apps training is about investing in and elevating the digital skills of the Deaf community to build more resources, and to use those resources to connect families with deaf children. We have a global demand for our programs, and we want to support Deaf communities all over the world. We train the Deaf community to become authors of stories, and to tell our own stories, all that support literacy development of deaf children.

The world has not heard stories by Deaf people, and we want to tell those stories. 

Only 3% of deaf children receive bilingual education worldwide, according to the World Federation of the Deaf. United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) has articles that specify the importance of sign language acquisition and access in education and in all areas of a deaf person's life. Human rights of deaf people, especially deaf children are denied, without language access. 

Globally there are an estimated 460 million deaf people, and each country has their national organization for Deaf people's rights, that are run by deaf people. This existing network makes it possible for us to bring our programs to worldwide scale, to bring our resources and to capacity build digital skills of Deaf communities, so the local communities can take lead in communicating, connecting, and bridging resources to families with deaf children.

We are specifically trying to end the dismal lack of language access for each deaf child. 

How do we do this? By the power of stories made readily accessible in sign language, created and told by our Deaf talents, through our groundbreaking platform: the VL2 Storybook Creator. 

We offer training, mentoring, and support to emerging Deaf talents (artists, storytellers, filmmakers) through creating stories using our platform: VL2 Storybook Creator. They learn digital skills required to make a storybook app and learn basic programming skills - those skills are essential for communication in this time and age. They also happen to be the same set of skills needed to create literature materials for young deaf children. Our storybook apps are designed based on research on bilingualism and visual learning.

We work with different teams in various countries, and provide them with the tools and resources to build their own storybook apps in their own sign languages and written languages. This builds Deaf stories, Deaf representation, and most importantly: we share stories with the world. New families with deaf babies need those resources to connect. 

We want to work with MORE Deaf communities around the world. We have received many requests and we are stretched thin with our current capacity. We want to offer more training, more mentoring, and of course: more opportunities for deaf talents. Deaf artists, Deaf storytellers, Deaf filmmakers, Deaf graphic designers. This allows Deaf people to lead their own projects, their own storybook app production. 

As someone who is 3rd generation Deaf, this community is my home. I grew up bilingual, and went to a school for the deaf that has a robust bilingual (ASL/English) program and I attended many leadership training programs growing up. In my 20's, I got involved with the World Federation of the Deaf Youth Section for four years, and organized international youth camps, I met and built a strong network with many fantastic Deaf people all over the globe. There are many leaders, many stories, many brilliant minds - but opportunities are very hard to find. Funding for sign language resources are difficult to obtain. Funding to support language access is difficult to find. I am not saying the Deaf community is a sad one, in fact, we are proud, extremely networked, but deaf people are not in leadership positions. Our stories aren't "important" and we are too small in numbers to make people listen. But, none of those are valid reasons to deny humanity of deaf children. We do have answers. We have solutions. We are asking for support, investment, and growth. 

The core of our work is about language access for deaf children, and we approach this issue by investing in the local Deaf community to capacity build their digital skills. By the nature of this work, we are elevating opportunities for Deaf people who has been historically underrepresented and still are.

We believe our programs foster connections, and provides opportunity to build allyship, and we can work together to implement better policies and practices in deaf education and access.

I see our program as a part of a much bigger picture addressing human rights of deaf children.

I started developing the world's first bilingual storybook app in 2012 because technology finally allowed us to create what transformed how we think of "reading" as. On touchscreen tablets we can combine both video and text, and alternate between ASL to English. It was groundbreaking work. What led me to that, let me backtrack a bit.

I first joined Visual Language and Visual Learning (research center) as a community engagement coordinator. In other words, I went out to the community and shared research findings. We tried to go further than the usual conference circuit route. However, at events and conferences, all the parents I met kept asking me "how and what" as in "what should I read to my child," "how can I encourage literacy," and so on. It really didn't matter what research said, they wanted to know what they could do at home. I understood that they needed tangible resources, what they can use, touch, read, interact with. 

This is the backstory to why I started storybook apps to support literacy development. I proposed and got internal funding to start the development. One app became fifteen. There is no stopping this work.

The problem is lack of language access, and lack of quality language resources. And we really do have answers, the tools, the means, the understanding to solve this. And if we can solve language deprivation that will be one of the biggest things in this century. 

I'm passionate about this because this really does work. We've seen deaf children learn new words from storybook apps. We've seen Deaf storytellers hone their craft. We've seen new fans of deaf artists who provide artwork for the apps. 

Our work may seem pretty simple: we work and train on storybook app development. But the process involved is far reaching, and requires capacity building. 

For instance, when we worked with a country, we discuss studio capabilities. One cannot make bilingual resources without right videocameras, lighting, and studio access. So, we capacity build. We make sure resources are in place. The work is empowering. Deaf people have more tools to create knowledge, to create content, to tell stories, to publish. It is representation. This work, in my eyes, is vital. I'm passionate because we must do this to support our next generation. If we can make tomorrow better by what we do today, that's enough.

I'm a creative at heart. My biggest inspirations are my grandparents. My grandfather was a trailblazer in ASL storytelling, while my grandma was the first deaf person to get a doctorate in Political Science (US Government back then) and her passion was the human rights of deaf children. They both had immense influence on me growing up. They were from a very different era (that was before ADA, that was before relay service, that was before captioning) but they were brilliant and very unapologetic about their Deaf way of being. (I love them.) 

I have a Masters in Deaf Culture, specializing in Deaf History. I have a MFA in Visual Narrative. I couldn't stop taking classes and kept taking classes on web development (that kind of led me to my work on apps). 

I'm excited, curious, and kind. I believe in opportunities. I founded Motion Light Lab because there was NOTHING out there, and I knew we needed an innovative R&D space that intersects technology and literature. And I kept going at it. I found funding, I mentored, and I built a team. Now I want to keep offering more. 

I also co-founded a company with my siblings, to create an app that teaches ASL. We've expanded that to offer other apps with collaborators in other countries. We've been doing extremely well with that. 

I would never be where I am if not for my team, friends, family, mentors, and collaborators. I am thankful I've always worked with great people.

We faced huge scheduling setback with our training program because of COVID19 but out of it came something truly fantastic. We decided to pivot a bit and focused on building ASL resources based on our storybook apps for all the children who are at home and trying to do distance learning. We set up ASL Literacy Activities  - at no cost. To date, over 2,500 families signed up for our daily themed activities. As for our training program, we are leaning on our online modules, and now we offer webinars and open lab hours on zoom for our participants. We have 80 people enrolled in our program now. 

It still is a challenge, because we have very vague timeline of when we will "resume" in-person training but we will continue to work through this and keep the work going.  It has also heightened the importance of digital skills capabilities and knowledge, so our work has a sense of urgency to it added now.

When I was working on my masters in Deaf Culture, I had the opportunity to do a thesis project. I decided to investigate a new topic: Deaf youth representation in America. I wanted to understand the fabric of our Deaf youth within the context of our generations (Gen X, Milliennials, Gen Z). That thesis project led me to interview many deaf leaders and to analyze underlying factors of lack of deaf youth representation. When I wrapped up my thesis (and graduated), I had a new plan. I headed off to Louisiana with around 70 other deaf youth to a national forum I organized. (Why Louisiana? We had our national Deaf organization conference, so we wanted to have youth forum and representation there).  We camped for three days at a state park, hosted many roundtables, forums, and out of it came a brand new organization: Deaf Youth USA. For, by, and about Deaf Youth. DYUSA lasted about 6 years before evolving to become an organizational affiliate with a parent organization. I also aged out of 30 years cutoff, but it was an incredible experience and I loved my time organizing and debating with youth leaders all over the country. 

Motion Light Lab is a non-profit lab part of Gallaudet University, the world's only University that serves Deaf and hard of hearing students. We have been able to grow in capacity with strong support from the university's research center, Visual Language and Visual Learning. 

We still receive funding from the University but in a limited capacity, to support operations costs. However, with our growing programs and our expanding impact, external funding like this opportunity will make a significant difference in our programs. 

We are the only one doing this work, with our programs and approaches. Our storybook apps are groundbreaking, and we have built a storybook creator platform (a Xcode template) and at the time of writing we are working on an Android compatible platform. 

Our training program is the only program of its kind; and we offer it online too, fully accessible in ASL (not in international sign, yet).  Why is this important?  There are many tutorials on YouTube but auto-captioning doesn't come out right, making the learning process difficult.  

Our work is the only program that seeks and hires Deaf talents (storytellers, graphic designers, artists, filmmakers) and mentors them. 

(Activity) Training programs > (Result) increased bilingual resources > (Impact) Deaf children develop literacy skills

(Impact) Deaf talents build experience

(Impact) Deaf people capacity build and gain digital skills 

Research findings from Visual Language and Visual Learning shows that:
Early sign language acquisition leads to strong literacy skills 
Quality signing models support language acquisition and use 
Fingerspelling helps bridge ASL and English, and helps with letter identification in reading 

Efficacy study on VL2 Storybook Apps show that:
Children who are exposed to ASL early focus on vocabulary words
Children who are late-exposed to ASL focus on the storytelling part 
Children learn and identify new words from storybook apps

Current number of people: 200 collaborators and participants; 2500 families, 5000 children

In one year:  same

In five years: 500 collaborators/participants, 7,000 families, and 20,000 children. 

Within next year:

• Capacity build Motion Light Lab team
• Support our global teams
•  Create more storybook apps
• Continue to grow ASL Literacy Activities
• Maintaining storybook apps and creator platform

Within the next 5 years:

• Strong international program within Motion Light Lab
• Collaborations with UN, WFD, and other global programs
• Great funding mechanism
• R&D development
• Provide a large global digital library 
• Improved storybook apps and creator plaftorm

Funding is the main barrier. 

We have already established working relationships with multiple countries; but to continue to support them and see this scale, we need funding and team capacity. 

Our training program faces difficulty with COVID19 restrictions. If this continues for another 1 or 2 years, I'm unsure how much of that will impact us. We can go fully online. 

Technical- Apple's OS updates change swiftly and we always spend a lot of resources to ensure the capabilities of our platform and to ensure our apps are still up to date. Our work on Android platform has been a long one, and a second attempt at the project. 

Funding - by applying and reaching out to Foundations. We earn a very small revenue from storybook apps, it's not enough. 

We earn small revenues from storybook app sales, and they all go back to the development. 

We rely mostly on University support and grants. 

We see grant funding as a big mechanism for us. 

Major expenses are on staffing and operational costs. 

The funding from this prize will help us further establish our global training programs to provide more resources to the countries that need them, and to support and capacity build. 

To make this happen, we need to hire a project manager and add a programmer on the team to implement further support. 

Our barriers are our limited capacity.